Maybe attack ads work. Maybe they backfire.
Maybe they just make people hate democracy.
I wrote a week ago that the attack ads by local state senate candidate Republican Randy Sparacino against the incumbent Democrat Jeff Golden were a net loss for Sparacino. I said they backfired. The denoted message of the ads is that Golden is terrible--that he wants to increase fire insurance rates, that he is somehow responsible for worldwide inflation, that he likes or tolerates crime. I concluded that no persuadable voter thinks those charges are real. The one message that actually gets through is that Sparacino is a Republican riding on the back of a huge number of Republican business PACs. I wrote that this message hurts Sparacino in a Democratic-leaning district.
People told me I was dead wrong. They said that by election day a great many people will dislike Jeff Golden and that is the point. Make him a villain. Moreover, he will look like a patsy for getting dumped on and not returning fire. People want a fighter who will win for their team. That is the election choice: Fighter or nice guy, winner or loser. They told me there is indeed a subtext message in all those ads. It is that Sparacino is on the winning team. He has powerful backers. It doesn't matter where he gets the money or what they want. What matters is that he has it. People vote for the strong guy, the guy that is doing the kicking. "Don't be naive," friends told me.
I asked veteran journalist Tam Moore about this. Tam Moore has been in politics and writing about it for over 60 years. He has seen it all. He sent me this:
Attack ads abound.
Some of us hate them. But political scientists say negative advertising has its place in campaign strategies.
Moore
This is the season – the countdown is on for mid-term elections. The TV breaks in my local news casts are exploding with attack ads for two races. Oregon’s three-way gubernatorial election weeks ago blossomed with negative ads. Now the well-financed effort to oust an incumbent state senator is broadcasting scary TV spots.
As a retired journalist with experience in both broadcast and print media, and with four years in elected office at the county level back in the 1970s, I think negative ads do a disservice to democracy. When you say bad things about an opponent, be they the incumbent or the challenger, some of it sticks in the minds of the electorate. In effect, negative ads lower trust in government.
But historians would tell you Americans have a track record of nasty political dialog. Check out the 1800 presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. One contemporary printed commentary called Adams a “blind, toothless man who wants to start a war.” Fast forward to 1824 and the emergence of Andrew Jackson, a controversial president credited with fathering modern American party politics. Jackson was crucified in the opposition press which called his wife an “adulteress and a whore.” He lost that campaign by a slim margin but came back to win in 1828 – after facing a replay of public attacks on his wife.
The advent of television after World War II added an audio and video dimension to negative political advertising. Click here for Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy Ad.” It ran once with lasting impact on Johnson’s opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater. For context, Goldwater, a brigadier general in the air national guard, had said he thought tactical unit commanders – not the President of the United States – should decide when to use smaller nuclear weapons.
Daisy is the favorite ad of John G. Greer, author of the 2008 book in Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. He notes that Daisy aired one time on national TV, and folks still talk about it. Says Greer, negative advertising, through focus on important political issues, give voters “critical information” which enriches the democratic process.
It is estimated by those following this year’s mid-term elections that nearly $10 billion will be spent by candidates and political action campaigns. Much of it goes to broadcast and cable TV ads, plus a growing number of targeted ads place on the Internet. Michael Schaus, writing last month in the Nevada Independent, observes that while we used to be able to hit the “mute” button on TV remotes, that’s not the case with impressions on our Internet feeds.
“Today’s political ads don’t merely play on endless loops during brief commercial breaks, they seem to appear everywhere. Even for those voters who have “cut the cord” and done away with traditional TV, the ads have followed them to the new and once-wonderous world of online streaming,” wrote Schaus.
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| Annual Review of Political Science |
Political scientists, psychologists and communications experts have studied negative ads nearly to death. Here’s a chart from one 2009 literature-search paper showing the rise and fall of the attention given negative ads in recent decades – both in printed stories and academic publications.
Some takeaways from all that research:
*** In the United States attack ads apparently have almost no negative effect on voter turnout; the several differences observed over the decades just aren’t statistically significant.
*** 82% of Americans dislike attack ads.
There’s a big caution from some of the studies. Apparently after a voter decides on a candidate, if a flurry of attack ads surface late in the campaign, voter turnout does decrease. Not only that, voters favoring the victim of the ads tend to mobilize – their turnouts increase. It’s the candidate on whose behalf the attack was launched who suffers decreased turnout.
Attack ads late in a campaign may backfire, to say nothing of the ad’s impact on credibility of all office holders. There’s a trust factor here.
And in these times of Political Action Committees buying advertising without permission of the candidates or their campaigns, these campaigns are at risk of suffering a loss from a tactic which wasn't part of their strategy.
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7 comments:
Negative ads could be useful if they provide information rather than disinformation. For example, negative ads made it clear that Walker, the Republican senate candidate in Georgia, is a shameless hypocrite and liar. Of course, that runs the risk of endearing him to Republican voters even more, because he's just like their cult leader.
Negative political ads are for the most part juvenile, wrought from the minds of those who aren't capable of more nuanced, intelligent promotion and insult the intelligence of voters. Their use can be directly associated with campaign consultants who convince their clients that they can only win if they smear their opponents, and are a corrupt result of money, money, money in politics.
It makes me sad that Republicans in our state have unleashed a barrage of negative mostly false, commercials, forcing Democrats to respond and clouding the real issues. It's testimony to the fact they have nothing to offer.
We deserve better.
It's a political truism that "you can't govern if you don't win", but it's also true that "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
I wonder if Mr. Moore would agree that 82% of Americans disliking attack ads is hardly inconsistent with the same ads working largely as intended.
Addressing Mr. Sage's usage here, it could be that practitioners don't hate democracy so much as they distrust it, or simply use it to advantage.
The most votes in the classical Greek agora typically went to the candidate who brought the most wine, bread and/or bullyboys with him to the occasion.
For me, Saul Alinsky's take on modern politicking still rings truest. Most regular voters are fully-formed and set on worldview, with few variations.
Elections hence are won and lost on the comparatively disengaged or uninformed, charitably known as "independents", "moderates" and "undecideds".
Such voters by their nature prioritize what they are persuaded is bad, as against candidates who are supposedly greedy, dishonest, crazy or stupid.
It's a far cry from the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
More often than not, negative ads trigger counter-negative ads along the lines of, "How dare she says such things about so and so," or "We don't do this in our town/county/state" (as opposed to, "That's how they do elections in Texas" or whatever other place we think we're better than). Remember when Tonia Moro was pilloried for negative campaigning in the race to fill Dr. Alan Bates' seat? DeBoer supporters even had Dr. Bates' widow weigh in. Mr. DeBoer won that race, of course. Tonia Moro did not deserve the treatment she got. Nor did Lynn Howe deserve the opprobrium dished out to her by Republicans when the Democrats pointed out that Sal Esquivel didn't pay his real property taxes every year (it was perfectly legal for him to wait until the fourth year or whatever to pay, but criticizing him for waiting seemed to the Democratic Party to be a good idea at the time). Given that this sort of thing seems to be par for the course, the Watermelon Summer imbroglio doesn't bother me much. Politics ain't bean bag.
Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy Ad” … ran once with lasting impact on Johnson’s opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater. For context, Goldwater, a brigadier general in the air national guard, had said he thought tactical unit commanders – not the President of the United States – should decide when to use smaller nuclear weapons.
The US military is the best in the world in a part because it pushes authority down as far as possible to local commanders who are the ones with the best tactical information. This is in contrast to Soviet/Russian doctrine, in which decisions always come down from the top. The current war in Ukraine is an object lesson as to which approach works better.
After World War II, the free world went through a massive military drawdown. The Soviet union did not. Their conventional military vastly outnumbered ours.
During the Cold War, the threat from the Soviet Union was that they would mount a massive attack to conquer Western Europe. Our only hope of deterring/defeating that attack with our smaller, outnumbered military was through the use of tactical nukes, which are much less powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, but much more effective than conventional explosives. This was our explicit military doctrine. Local commanders needed the authority to decide when and how to use those tactical nukes.
Barry Goldwater’s political mistake was to be honest about how our strategy worked and who needed the authority to use those tactical nukes. Lyndon Johnson’s ad was politically effective but totally dishonest, something not unknown in the realm of political advertising.
“Nor did Lynn Howe deserve the opprobrium dished out to her by Republicans when the Democrats pointed out that Sal Esquivel didn't pay his real property taxes every year.”
The Howe campaign distribute a flyer claiming Sal Esquivel was advocating a sales tax on food. PolitiFact investigated it and rated it Pants on Fire.
I remember, because I was handed that flyer and was the person who contacted PolitiFact and sent them the flyer (proud of that!). She then accused me of being a friend of Esquival. I didn’t know and had never met him. I was outraged by the fear tactic. After she lost she walked by our house, I speculated to see who I was. She went on to become chair of the local Democratic Party.
Here’s the link. Thanks for the memory.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/oct/06/lynn-howe/lynn-howe-says-sal-esquivel-wants-tax-milk-bread-e/
Truly scary indeed here is the ad put out by the Democrat National Committee exemplifying the 2022 platform
https://youtu.be/e5_3XOEga4s
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